Graphic

Report
- The above graphic shows shot charts for the Minnesota Timberwolves
every three years from 1999 to 2024.
- The points on the graphs represent made/missed shots.
- The points on the graphs are also perfectly proportioned with the
functionalized background line of the NBA court.
- Some key trends we can see as the years get more recent are:
- Increased amount of 3 point attempts
- Increased amount of shot attempts by or directly under the
basket
- Decreased amount of 2 point shot attempts outside of the free throw
rectangle
More Details
- The shot charts are shown from 1999 to 2024, chosen specifically for
9 seasons first because of visual purposes to make a perfect square for
the charts, but also because I wanted to showcase a wide range of years
to show an overall trend in how shots have changed over time.
- The green points represent made shots, while the red represent
missed shots. I also made them pretty opaque, in order to better see
where the most overlap occurs in different regions of the court.
- In order to get the points to be graphed proportionally with the NBA
court, I divided each original x and y location value by ten, as well as
multiplying the x values by a negative since the original values are
flipped in the nbastatR package. I also added the hoop center dimension
to the y values in order to translate them to all be in bounds of the
court background. One key note is that we are only looking at a little
less than half of a court, since we are only interested in one team’s
shots, but this may have left out a few outlying shot points that were
past half court. Overall, this doesn’t affect the overall trends seen in
the shot data, so the extra space showing more of a court would add did
not seem necessary in this case.
- The key trends we can see all relate to the opacity of the points,
meaning that where the graph is darker is where more shots were taken,
making it easy to see trends especially when looking at a span of 25
years of shot data.
This section calculates an expected value for a 4 point arc in the
NBA.
To calculate where a 4 point line should be on an NBA court, I needed
to find the expected value for a 4 point shot. To do this, I decided to
use data from the past 10 years for the Minnesota Timberwolves, because
gathering shot data from every single team over many years would likely
be too much to handle, especially since taking it over many years would
likely result with similar findings regardless of what team is being
looked at. I also decided to look at more recent years, because that
makes our findings more relevant to today.
To start, I calculated the expected value for 2 and 3 point shots,
which looks like this: Expected shot value (n) = (total n pointers made
* n) / total n pointer attempts. From this, I got ~1.02 for 2 pointers
and ~1.06 for 3 pointers. Because these values are 0.04 apart, I decided
that the optimal place for a 4 point line would be where the
corresponding shots line up with an expected value around 1.10, which
would be an additional 0.04 above the 3 point expected value. I then
calculated the expected values for 4 point shots at various distances,
finding that the expected value at 27 or more feet from the hoop is
~1.16 and at 28 or more feet it is ~0.95. From this, I can conclude that
the ideal distance for a 4 point arc, given that it is just a
simply-shaped arc, would be at about 27.7 feet away from the hoop (which
gets the expected value to be ~1.10).
One consequence of adding a 4 point line to the NBA could be that the
entire nature of the game could be changed. If players now have more
incentive for taking longer shots, there would most likely be less shots
taken at the 3 point and especially the 2 point range. In my eyes, this
would make basketball a much more offense-dominated sport, because it
would make the court more spread out. Players would not go for 2 point
shots as often, and the potential for rebounds and defense in that area
would lessen.